This is my year of horrible reading. I am reading the classics of horror fiction during thecourse of 2016, and each week will write abouta significant work in the genre. You are invitedto join me in my annus horribilis. During the course of the year—if we survive—we willhave tackled zombies, serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and monsters of all denominations. Check back each week for anew title...but remember to bring along garlic, silver bullets and a protective amulet. T.G.

Kōbō Abe's Dark FableThe Woman in the Dunes

What is the meaning of this strange 1962 novel about a man trapped in a sunken village of sand?

by Ted Gioia

If I could pass binding laws for fiction writers, I’d impose a ban on dream sequences. Icringe whenever a character falls asleep and the story moves into slumber time. Why?The narrative now lacks motivation, drive and (worst of all) consequences. Even ascary dream won’t scare us, nor will a bizarre dream bewilder us—because readersrealize it’s all just a dream. Even so, there’s some savage irony here: the main result ofthese fictional dream sequences is to put the reader to sleep. Life imitates art, huh?

On the other hand, I am fascinated by a certainschool of modern fiction in which the whole storypossesses a dreamlike quality. Here the reader’scoordinates are unstable; consequences andpossibilities are rich with implication. Anythingmight happen, but there will be no soothing returnto reality, no awakening to dispel the demons. Theauthor takes us to some hitherto unknown border-land, between the sober reality of the fully alertmind and the hallucinatory regions of oursubconscious psyche.

I’m not surprised that the first masters of thisstyle of writing were authors with an acutesense for the macabre and disturbing. Anyaccount of the history of dreamlike fiction needsto acknowledge the importance of Edgar Allan Poe,H.P. Lovecraft and other literary masters of thenascent horror genre. Even so, Franz Kafka standsout as the seminal figure in exploring the broaderpossibilities of this approach, creating in workssuch as The Castle and The Trial a tone andambiance that was less easy to pin down. Yes,an element of horror was palpable, but you couldalso read these works as political commentaries,existential fables, or some new surreal style of writing that we have learned to callKafkaesque. His brave exploration of these interstices between the real and unrealmade possible the later ascendancy of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, SamuelBeckett, Eugène Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet and other colonizers of literarydreamland.

Kōbō Abe belongs on this list, although his name is less familiar in the West thanthose of these predecessors. When Kenzaburō Ōe won the Nobel Prize in literature in1994, he remarked that Abe, who had passed away a few months earlier, had deservedthe honor. Haruki Murakami has also praised this author, stating that in his readingsof the major Japanese writers of the generation preceding his, he was most drawn toAbe’s work. Abe ranks among a handful of authors to win both the Yomiuri and theAkutagawa prizes—lucrative honors (currently one million yen goes to the winners ofeach) and with great prestige in Japan. Yet even well-read fans of literary fiction in theWest will hardly recognize his name, let alone know his works.

The Woman in the Dunes, published in 1962, is Abe’s best known book, and capturesthe unsettling mixture of claustrophobia, terror and surrealism that pervade thisauthor’s worldview. A teacher Niki Jumpei decides to spend his vacation pursuing hishobby of collecting insects. He has aspirations of discovering a new type of beetle, andthus achieving a small dose of distinction. When such finds are made, Abe (a real-lifebug collector) reminds us “the discoverer’s name appears in the illustratedencyclopedias of entomology appended to the Latin name of the newly found insect;and there, perhaps, it is preserved for something less than eternity.”

The teacher believes that his best chance of finding a hitherto unknown beetle willcome from studying unusual habitats, where new forms may have evolved inadaptation to the changed environment. He decided to focus on sandy terrains, andthus heads off for a different kind of beach vacation, with the catching net, jars andchemicals necessary for his quest.

As it turns out, Niki Jumpei will find himself captured and kept, a human specimentrapped in the same environment in which he had hoped to be the collector. Strangelyenough, John Fowles was writing a similar novel, The Collector, at virtually the sametime as Abe—in both works an entomologist gets caught up in the illegal detention ofpeople. But Fowles’ work, one of his least distinguished, rarely rises above the level ofan inquiry into aberrant criminal psychology. Abe, in contrast, crosses over intodreamtime, bringing together the most incongruous and implausible elements into astory as shifting and unstable as the dunes it describes, yet presented with a rigor andattention to symbolic valence that never collapses into sheer fantasy or mindlesshorror.

On his trip, the teacher travels first by train,then bus, and finally walks the finalstretch to the beach. On his way, he passesa bizarre series of makeshift houses, eachsinking deeper and deeper into the sand thecloser he approaches the shore. "Theimpression became more striking as he wentalong. At length, all the houses seemed tobe sunk into hollows scooped in the sand. The surface of the sand stood higher thanthe rooftops. The successive rows of housessank deeper and deeper into the depressions."

Caught up in his beetle hunting, Jumpei misses the last bus back to the train station.The local villagers offer to put him up in one of houses in the sand holes for the night,where an obliging widow will look after him. With no other options, he accepts theiroffer, and climbs down a rope ladder to the bottom of a deep pit, where he meets thewidow, who proves to be a friendly if reticent hostess, and is invited to stay in herfragile, poorly furnished home.

The next day, the rope ladder is missing, and the teacher realizes that the villagershave no intention of letting him leave. He is expected to help the widow in the endlesstask of removing the sand that accumulates endlessly in holes where the locals live. The woman, for her part, welcomes his company and assistance, and shows no interestin helping him escape or in leaving herself. When he refuses to assist in the sandremoval and other household chores, the villagers respond by cutting off the supply ofwater. In time, Jumpei is forced to work and comply, at least superficially, with thedemands put on him—yet he continues to plot methods of breaking out of his buriedprison cell.

The whole setting is pervaded with a sick surrealism, yet Abe imposes on thisnightmare an unflagging rationalism, even a scientific attitude. Here the author’s ownuncharacteristic background comes to the fore. In a path atypical for a writer, Abeshowed an early interest in mathematics, and later pursued studies in medicine. Heeventually received a degree in medicine from Tokyo Imperial University, butreportedly did so poorly in his studies that he was allowed to graduate only if hepromised never to take a job as a doctor. Instead he focused on writing, but his interestin science continued to find an outlet in his insect collecting. In The Women in theDunes, Abe repeatedly adopts a clinical perspective more commonly found in alaboratory than a modern novel. His protagonist analyzes the properties of the sand,constructs hypothesizes, builds apparatuses, designs experiments. Yet rather thanundermining the Kafkaesque qualities of the story, this attention to logic and detailreinforces the claustrophobia and loneliness of the novel. Here is the ugly flip side ofCartesian rationality: the scientific method as a source of isolation. I think, therefore Iam cut asunder.

One can construct other approaches to this novel. During the decade after TheWoman in the Dunes was published, Japan’s standard of living would double, and aneconomy that had previously suffered from the sacrifices of postwar rebuilding wouldfinally achieve a degree of comfort and affluence. Yet Japan’s economic miracle couldonly be achieved with a degree of self-sacrifice and tireless labor that has seldom beenemulated elsewhere. What could be a better way of evoking this shared sense of theindividual’s subservience to the broader community and society than Abe’s story of thecaptive endlessly removing the sand that threatens to engulf him?

Yet no single interpretation does justice to this rich work. Even so, the storyrelentlessly forces the reader to apply judgments and principles. Other dream-oriented works settle for smaller effects, teaching us to laugh at the absurdity of thecircumstances, but undermining the intensity of the story by the surreal tone. TheWoman in the Dunes is not that kind of book. Rather, Abe comes across as the anti-Aesop, the storyteller who insists that we learn from his fable, but in place of ‘themoral of the story’ leaves us with only a blank space. Even after the final page, we areleft feeling that, much like the hero of this story, even if we cannot rise to thechallenge, we can hardly walk away.

Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His latest book isHow to Listen to Jazz, published by Basic Books.